Op Ed: All Animals Should Be Equal

"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others,” wrote George Orwell in Animal Farm, a story about farm animals who overthrow their farmer, hoping to create a society of equality, but the pigs, led by Napoleon, gradually seize power, betraying the revolution’s ideals and establishing a dictatorship as oppressive as the one they replaced.

Sound familiar? It’s been happening at the Providence City Council, where a Democratic Socialist has been president and has feathered her nest at taxpayers’ expense. Outgoing Council President Rachel Miller has led the council for four years. She increased the Council’s administrative budget by 66 percent, adding over a $1 million in personnel, salaries, and benefits, while the city finances continue to struggle.

Providence City Council members earn $18,765, with the President earning $20,850. They are considered part-time employees, but they are eligible for additional compensation with the city’s generous health and dental insurance and pension system.

The council staff now numbers 17, two more than the number of elected councilors, and if you call the council for constituent services, you are often directed to the city’s 311 number. She brought in a new chief of staff and doubled his salary. He was then arrested twice and was responsible for a council credit card that had almost $50,000 in transactions, including $15,000 for Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) conventions and events that were disallowed by the auditor as they were ‘political’ expenditures.

When Miller’s finance chair didn’t support her, she created a Ways and Means committee to control finances on the $650,000,000 budget. She is clearly beholden to the teachers’ union and supports their efforts against charter schools, which is already an issue in both the mayoral and gubernatorial races. Mayor Smiley has supported charter schools because they provide high-quality educational options for families and because they are willing to lease and reuse vacant neighborhood public school buildings.

The council passed a rent-control ordinance that heavily favored renters but failed to override the mayor’s veto, an issue that has become a key matter in the 2026 mayoral race. Rent control has repeatedly failed to deliver affordability and has consistently produced negative outcomes for housing supply, property values, and community stability. Just look at the threat of it in Boston, and you can see the dramatic decline in the construction of new rental units. There is also a lower quality of housing, since landlords are less inclined to make repairs if they can’t cover rising costs (property insurance is up 26 percent in the last three years!) with higher rents. If the goal is affordability, the solution is increasing housing supply. There is a place for sensible rent control in protecting tenants from absurd predatory rent hikes, but it doesn’t create the new housing that is so desperately needed.

Providence needs elected officials who want to improve the quality of life for all residents but understand that there is only a finite amount of revenue that can be squeezed from property taxes. And wasting money on expanding the council staff could be better used on “real” quality-of-life issues.

With an election coming, there is a new wrinkle with Democrats who are left of left. They are the Democratic Socialists who have won several mayoral elections, notably in New York and Seattle, with promises that are both unrealistic and unachievable but sound good to young people and college professors, like defunding the police and “free” everything. The DSA wants its followers to believe that capitalism is bad despite the fact that capitalism has brought more people out of poverty than anything else. Ironically, if they get elected, they quickly realize that the money to subsidize their grandiose policies and subsidies just doesn’t exist.

Providence has a lot going for it – something readily apparent to the thousands of World Cup fans who speak so highly of our city and embrace our diversity, our functionality, and our beauty. There is a broad base of candidates, many with high levels of energy and enthusiasm. But if their ideas are not grounded in realistic expectations and not accompanied by tangible means of paying for them, the results are more likely to resemble the pigsty from Animal Farm than a roadmap for success. Meet the candidates who are asking for your vote and realistically assess their promises. Often, a follow-up question will let you gauge whether they’re real or fairy tales.